Dear Friends,
With the permission of the European Academy of Religion we are happy to share with you the panel Ecclesiological Investigations: Writing Difference, Reading the World, organised and chaired by Aaron Hollander (Graymoor Ecumenical and Interreligious Institute / Ecumenical Trends).
This panel was organized as an Ecclesiological Investigations contribution to the European Academy of Religion’s 2020 annual meeting, and was moved online due to COVID-19. EUARE has hosted numerous virtual panels from this conference on their YouTube channel, and we are pleased to share this EI panel here as well.
“Writing Difference, Reading the World: Ecumenical/Interreligious Journals and the Future of a Shifting Field”
Abstract
An increasingly urgent need in interreligious studies and the interfaith movement has been to reckon with the power and provenance of divisions within the traditions under consideration. At the same time, ecumenical efforts and analyses (in Christianity particularly but not exclusively) do not exist and have never existed except contextualized by multireligious societies and global horizons. And both “interreligious” and “ecumenical” affairs, as conventionally construed, are inextricable from political—as well as psychological, cultural, economic, and ecological—dynamics that cannot be reduced to religious interpretations. The several journals that seek to coordinate and disseminate scholarship dealing with the dynamics of religious difference on common ground have each approached these continuities differently, shaping separate (though intersecting) conversations in which the relations between ecumenical, interreligious, and political affairs are variously delineated. In this panel, building upon last year’s panels on the history of the ecumenical journals in particular, a group of journal editors will turn to the future, considering together how their respective scholarly vehicles are seeking to make sense of these unstable borders, for the sake of a richer, more reflexive, and more collaborative understanding of the scholarly field.
Participants
-Aaron Hollander (Graymoor Ecumenical & Interreligious Institute; Ecumenical Trends) – Chair
-Stephen Brown (World Council of Churches; The Ecumenical Review)
-Nelly van Doorn-Harder (Wake Forest University, Interreligious Studies and Intercultural Theology)
-Terry Ray (Temple University, Journal of Ecumenical Studies)
-Axel Takács (Seton Hall University; Journal of Interreligious Studies)
